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Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org

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Re: Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org

#51

Post by keysdev »

Takennickname wrote: post #8

I said most of the same things in the Matrix foundation's server. The general response from the team was: "Pay money or shut up and accept what we give you". The number of gigantic changes in direction this project has had in the past couple of years is enough to sink any project. Jitsi to Webrtc, complete change in auth system, Element to Element X. There's two clients. One that's fast, and one that's full featured.…

https://schildi.chat is better client than Elememt IMHO. That was the whole point of matrix federated. You dont hear ppl complain oh I am going to give up on SMTP cause outlook or fill in the blank sucks. Then make another client or server.

EDIT:

It really sucks that the default implementation is so bloated. But I do not equate matrix with element.

Re: Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org

#52

Post by iforgotpassword »

To add to the pile:

- The web client doesn't load any images/media anymore for me in new sessions. I log in, I cross authenticate with another client, no images load. At work I've a very old browser session going and everything works.

- We host synapse at work to explore feasibility. Been going on for about 9 months now. Public profile lookup is disabled. This breaks inviting anyone from our company from another server, when the inviting user is using element. Because element tries to query the user info first, and if that fails with an unexpected error code, it will not allow you to continue sending the invitation. There's obviously an issue open for months now, where multiple people suggested they just add a warning that it couldn't check if the user exists, with a "continue anyways" button, but the devs prefer to come up with idiotic excuses why that would be a bad idea.

I did some quick research myself then, and it looks like the profile lookup is relayed through the server of the inviting user to the server of the user to be invited. The inviter's server converts any http error code from the invitee's server that is "not valid" to a generic error, that element then chokes on, here: https://github.com/element-hq/synapse/blob/1920dfff40ad10780...

i.e. Only 404 is valid, according to code and comment there.

But IN THE SAME FUCKING SOURCE FILE, they return a 403 if profile lookup is disabled: https://github.com/element-hq/synapse/blob/1920dfff40ad10780...

Can't get any better than this I guess. Cobbled together bullshit. I hope my company will consider this experiment failed soon and switch to slack or something. Anything.

Re: Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org

#53

Post by Arathorn »

dzaima wrote: post #13

The issue of broken rooms was reportedly the database having gotten corrupted indexes, which affected a bunch of rooms (2/55 of ones I was in): https://github.com/element-hq/synapse/issues/18606#issuecomm... . Not much a protocol/implementation can do about that. It did take over 2 weeks for it to be resolved though, which is a rather long period of time. Also on the status page - https://status.matrix.org/incidents/…

The corrupt room bug which pushed the OP over the edge was due to a corrupted DB index on matrix.org which caused millions of rows to be incorrectly deleted and was an absolute nightmare to debug and mitigate. You can see some of the story at https://marc.info/?t=175161814600006&r=1&w=2.

We need to write up the incident report; it’s not clear whether the root cause was a bug in postgres (potentially years ago, and only caused problems when we started using the corrupt piece of the index by coincidence) or due to potential corruption from a HW failure years ago.

The rooms affected should now work again after reconstructing the lost data. No data should have been lost over federation though; the room history should have synced up as normal. Also, only room state (not msgs) was effected. Do you have a bug report anywhere for the missing msgs?

Re: Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org

#54

Post by Arathorn »

dzaima wrote: post #41
udev4096 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, did anyone investigate on why messages were not stored by other homeservers? That's rather odd, given the selling point of matrix is federation

I've heard that messages not getting through federation in some cases is just a thing that can happen. How that's compatible with calling matrix as having good federation, I don't know.

I’m not aware of any scenarios, including this one, where messages don’t federate (unless the destination server has been unavailable and marked down, obviously).

Re: Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org

#55

Post by Arathorn »

the__alchemist wrote: post #10

My experience, contradicted when I bring it up usually (But not by this article): I've found the Element client to be slow and buggy, and I still can't figure out how to either verify my account, or get the verification notifications to go away.

I think everyone agrees that the classic Element client is slow and has a tonne of tech debt, including bad encryption UX, which is why we rebuilt it as Element X. Web /Desktop is yet to follow, although we’ve started it here: https://github.com/element-hq/aurora

Re: Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org

#56

Post by Arathorn »

keysdev wrote: post #51
Takennickname wrote: post #8

I said most of the same things in the Matrix foundation's server. The general response from the team was: "Pay money or shut up and accept what we give you". The number of gigantic changes in direction this project has had in the past couple of years is enough to sink any project. Jitsi to Webrtc, complete change in auth system, Element to Element X. There's two clients. One that's fast, and one that's full featured.…

https://schildi.chat is better client than Elememt IMHO. That was the whole point of matrix federated. You dont hear ppl complain oh I am going to give up on SMTP cause outlook or fill in the blank sucks. Then make another client or server. EDIT: It really sucks that the default implementation is so bloated. But I do not equate matrix with element.

you do understand that schildichat is a relatively light fork of element…?

Re: Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org

#57

Post by Arcuru »

Arathorn wrote: post #49
Arcuru wrote: post #28

This also comes as the organization is preparing a coordinated update to fix 2 CVEs in the protocol [1], that were originally reported 6 months ago. [1] https://matrix.org/blog/2025/07/security-predisclosure/

fwiw these CVEs weren’t reported 6 months ago; they were found during a project which has been running for 6 months.

Oh interesting! I guess I read that post wrong, thanks for clarifying.

I would be interested in learning more context around this issue once you are able to share, so hopefully there will be a report/post/etc after the embargo lifts.

Re: Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org

#58

Post by Arathorn »

_lvbh wrote: post #7

I'm of the same stance. I've been using Matrix for 3 years now, primarily to communicate with family located where there is high censorship and most messengers are blocked. Probably due to the complexity of the system and inherent design, performance is horrible. Good enough for usage but just unpleasant. Their new Element X client is meant to solve a lot of problems but they're starting to deviate from common standa…

It’s depressing to hear that you’ve given up on Element X, given that’s where all the work has been going, including ensuring the encryption is rock solid. Element Call is still webrtc; the fact it’s direct calling to a SFU rather than needing TURN for firewall traversal should be a good thing. How did you try to set it up? I did a basic walk through at https://github.com/element-hq/element-docker-demo in case that helps.

Re: Giving Up on Element and Matrix.org

#59

Post by mystraline »

We had a variation on this discussion a few days ago here

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44591820

I discussed that their primary server had a child porn/child sex assault imagery problem. Others who had similar concerns were completely dismissed and attacked by the Element/Matrix admins.

I have to agree with this article. Matrix is basically dead, and not worth keeping around. And it starves the open source ecosystem from better things taking hold.

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